Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

On this occasion, then, Providence appeared in the guise of an open-topped car belonging to the German army, an elegant high-bodied vehicle driven by a helmeted chauffeur whose chinstrap was immaculately placed. On the rear seat sat three individuals: two French soldiers in forage caps, flanking a Wehrmacht colonel. They had come from the south and been on their way for more than an hour, which showed how far behind the lines the tankettes were. But was there still a line on 20 June 1940? One wonders. The car was crossing the square when the colonel caught sight of the drama in which the Obersturmführer was already losing interest. He tapped the driver’s shoulder. The car braked in a cloud of dust. The Unterscharführer ordered his platoon to about-turn and present arms. Karl Schmidt attempted to inject an offhand note into his salute, but the colonel ordered him to approach.

‘What do you think you’re doing? Are you shooting civilians?’

‘They’re irregulars, Herr Oberst.’

‘They are not, because there aren’t any. And if there were, they would first of all be answerable to a court martial, not to an SS lieutenant.’

‘Herr Oberst, I assure you that they are dangerous bandits.’

The colonel sighed and stepped from his car to approach the men lined up in front of the Café des Amis.

‘Will you excuse me,’ he said in French to the two prisoners who flanked him, pale and with clenched teeth, on the rear seat.

The colonel approached Jacques Graindorge, who was seized again by a mad hope.

‘Were you sheltering these soldiers?’ he asked scornfully. ‘If one may call them soldiers …’

‘I thought they were Germans, General! I’m a friend of Germany, General, of Greater Germany, General.’

‘A friend of Germany ought to be able to tell the difference between a colonel and a general and a pair of khaki trousers and a pair of field-grey trousers. Or alternatively he’s an idiot, but even if he is we aren’t going to shoot every idiot on earth — we’d be here for years.’

One of the prisoners got out of the car and walked up to the colonel. Had it not been for his uniform, he could have been taken for a German: a tall Celt with curly blond hair, eyes of a clear blue, hollow cheeks.

‘Colonel, will you allow me to ask these men a question?’

‘Of course, my dear fellow.’

The man stared at the prisoners in turn, with great concentration.

‘Are there any Bretons among you?’

‘I am Anglo-Serb,’ Palfy said.

‘I’m Norman,’ Jean said.

‘From the Jura!’ Picallon sang out.

‘And you, Monsieur?’ The prisoner turned to Graindorge.

‘From the Auvergne!’

The man turned back to the colonel and shrugged.

‘They are of no interest to me at all. Having said that, Colonel, spare them if you’re able and if you believe, as I do, that we should begin our project in a spirit of reconciliation rather than hatred.’

‘Consider it done!’ the colonel said.

He called Karl Schmidt and ordered him to release the prisoners. The Obersturmführer protested. The officer reminded him of his rank. There was much heel clicking and more presenting of arms and the SS section drove away in its armoured cars.

‘Do we have you to thank?’ Palfy asked the Frenchman.

‘No. Thank the colonel.’

‘There are always blunders when two great peoples such as Germany and France are reconciled,’ the German said, ‘but it is well known in Berlin that your country has been plunged into a fratricidal war by unscrupulous politicians … Now, leave your two tankettes and try to rejoin your army …’

Laughing, he added, ‘… if you have strong legs.’

Jean studied the French prisoner who had spoken to the colonel with such assurance, and to whom the colonel spoke in a tone close to deference. In the colonel’s car, the other prisoner was looking both furious and bored. It was the combination of the two faces that reminded Jean where he had seen them before, one open and friendly, the other sarcastic and closed.

‘I’m wondering whether I might possibly know you,’ Jean said to the prisoner whose incomprehensible contribution to the situation had saved their lives. ‘You wouldn’t be a friend of the abbé Le Couec?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you know me too, and your friend sitting in the car owes his freedom to me. My name is Jean Arnaud and I led him by bicycle from Tôtes to Grangeville eight years ago. I was a little boy then.’

‘Jean! Jean from Grangeville!’

He kissed him. The colonel smiled. Things had been going very well ever since the morning. When he had asked a group of prisoners of war for any Bretons among them to make themselves known to him, he had had the surprise of coming across two senior members of the Breton National Party. The reader who still has a vague memory of Jean’s childhood will already have guessed that these two are Yann and Monsieur Carnac, names that in the underground denote the two separatists who, having taken part in the attack at Rennes on 6 August 1932, on the eve of a visit by Édouard Herriot, had fled and met up again at the abbé Le Couec’s rectory at Grangeville. A terrific coincidence, I will agree, having promised that these kinds of magic meetings would be putting in no further appearances, yet it must be admitted that in the general chaos of that time anything was possible. Monsieur Carnac stepped from the car and shook Jean’s hand.

‘I wouldn’t have recognised you. You’re a man now.’

The colonel (I have not given his name as we shall not be seeing him again in Jean Arnaud’s life; he is no petty Prussian squire with a monocle screwed into his eye — there really would have needed to be a fantastic reservoir of petty squires to supply the entire German army with officers — but a professor of Celtic studies at the University of Mainz whose detailed report on Breton separatism, published at the outbreak of war, had attracted the attention of the German high command), the colonel seemed over the moon. His grand political design was taking shape: the two prisoners he was taking to Dortmund, where separatists of every stripe, Breton, Basque, Corsican and Alsatian, were being assembled, had sympathisers in the rest of the country. They were not disliked, far from it. France was behind them!

We shall cut short the scene that followed. The colonel was in a hurry to return to Germany. He signed three safe-conduct passes for Palfy, Jean and Picallon and assured Graindorge of his protection.

‘If I may give you a word of advice,’ he said to the three soldiers, ‘it would be to throw away those uniforms and lose yourselves on one of the farms around here. Marshal Pétain requested an armistice last night. The war is over …’

The village square returned to a state of calm, and if the two tankettes had not still been parked in the shade it would have been easy to imagine that it was any summer’s day at siesta time. Graindorge, his fear evaporated, and overcome by shame and rage, hastened to his house and locked himself in. The three friends walked across to a clothes shop which they opened with a boot through the window. Inside, they found that all that was left were trousers and jackets that were either too large or too small. They spent the next two weeks on a farm bringing in the hay, heard that the armistice had been signed and the ceasefire had come into effect. Picallon, ever dutiful, left on his own to rejoin the regiment, said to be stationed at Clermont-Ferrand. Palfy and Jean took longer to get themselves organised. They had become fond of the farm, where they were looked after lavishly in the evenings when they came in from the fields. But once the hay was in, there was no longer any need for their services, and they set out. It was on the morning of their arrival at Clermont that we first caught sight of them on a café terrace, enjoying their regiment marching past and moved by a glimpse of a pretty young woman with ash-blond hair, wearing a dress of translucent lawn.